Former CEO of AMD says the company could get fancy and "put software accelerators on there or maybe do something like a graphics engine." We understand what he means, but the way he said it makes us think of a kid who's making his dream car. "Put some wings and a jet engine and some flames and some missiles pew pew!" [NY Times via TUAW via Crunchgear]

But they were wrong.

According to The Register, while Apple does not plan to continue modifying/improving P.A. Semi's PowerPC-based processor architecture, Apple has employed a number of veteran P.A. Semi staff members just for the task of supplying the current chips for years to come.

To us, it seems pretty logical, as if Apple is simply honoring the existing contracts/promises of P.A. Semi. Then again, it's just such a strange move from such a painstakingly marketed company—Apple and the military certainly make for strange bedfellows. More on this point from The Register:

While the information is limited at this point, we believe the military interest in PA Semi's low-power chip may have forced Apple's hand here. Uncle Sam hates to design new missiles only to have the guts ripped out by some dude in a mock turtleneck.

Ten defense systems, to the tune of $100 million in products over the next four years, use P.A. Semi's PWRficient processor. On Monday, P.A. Semi told its customers they were being acquired and couldn't guarantee chip supplies anymore. (Brings us back to the problem of obsolete tech in the military.)

It's possible the licensing issues could get worked out to maintain supply "on an end-of-life basis" but in that same statement, P.A. noted that their buyer (Apple) wasn't interested in their products or roadmap, just their IP and engineering skills. Which means Apple has no interest in anything their currently making or about to make, despite Blam's reasonable assumption that was the case. So it's all about their design chops, or they really are just a bargaining chip. [EETimes via GigaOM]

Products using the chips won't arrive for a year, at least, but we can assume that Apple wouldn't spend $278 million without some plans to use 'em soon as it made sense, and I'm sure Intel and ARM aren't stoked. The negotiations, which finished recently, took place in The Steve's home. Owning its own chip design is an interesting move. While the iPhone's had a lot of off the shelf componentry, it makes sense that working on its own internal hardware could yield better devices. Or a PowerPC repeat..which is the architecture I believe that the above processor is built on.

More research on that chip shows how it achieves such power efficiency. From Ars: "For instance, the chip sports over 25,000 clock gates so that clock pulses to different regions of the processor can be shut off dynamically to save power...All of the PA6T's major on-die components have their own separate clock and voltage domains, so that the L1, L2, DRAM controller, I/O subsystem, and each of the two cores can all be placed in different low-power states independently of one another."

Of course, the chips in portable such as an iPhone and iPod (as Forbes speculates) wouldn't be running so fast as the chip above. While it's unlikely they'd use that dual core 64 chip in Macs, given the Intel switch was so recent, it's my guess that P.A. Semi has a unannounced mobile chip that Jobs lusts after. Stands to reason, although Owen at Valleywag believes that the lack of economic scale for Semi makes it more likely that the buy is for IP to be implemented by others, as a bargaining chip. Regardless of tactics, the unnamed chip would have to be very efficient to best other offerings.

Intel's mobile platform, Atom, by comparison, can do 0.8 watts of usage at 800MHz, and VIA has a 0.1 watt solution that runs at 500MHz. ARM, designer of the current iPhone chip, is boasting that they can do a 0.25 watt A9 chip with multicores at 1GHz.

Historically, P.A. Semi was trying to be the chip provider for Macs around the time they chose to go for Intel, and it is reported that Dobberpuhl was furious when they went x86, thinking the Intel talks were just a bargaining chip. Some think that P.A. Semi lost its chance to be a brand name like AMD or Intel, but clearly, being under the brand name of Apple isn't half bad. [Forbes, Ars, Reg, VW]